Ants – DIY and Professional Ant Control
How long have you been battling ants in your kitchen, bathroom or around your home? The chances are that battle is ongoing. If you have an ant invasion, call one of our professional pest control specialists to deal with it for you. Here is why you keep battling ants.
Ants Are Social Insects
Social insects live in colonies, and each member has a role that they perform. Yellowjackets are social insects. Termites are social insects. Honey bees are social insects and so are ants. Oddly, Ants, bees, and wasps are all related – termites, not so much!
The reason that you keep battling ants is that you only address one of the roles within the colony. If you see a few ants here and there, then what you are seeing are the foragers. Their job is to find food and then tell the colony. Next thing you know, there is a swarm of ants invading. That swarm is the gathers or workers. Maybe you put down some bait or spray them with a pesticide. The ants die and in while you see a few more ants crawling around. More foragers. The cycle is predictable. The reason you never get rid of ants is that you are only killing off the ants that are our foraging or swarming into your house to collect food or water. You’ve done nothing about the colony of ants that lives in your yard or under your house.
How to Deal with a Colony of Ants
Texas is home to many different ant species including fire ants, which are not native. Native species include carpenter ants, Argentine ants, common turf ants, crazy ants, pyramid ants, and bigheaded ants. There is a host of other ant species here too. One of the first things that you need to know to control ants is which type is invading. For example, the approach to dealing with carpenter ants is very different from how you would deal with Argentine or harvester ants.
Call Swoboda Pest Control for ant control and ant identification.
Once you know what type of ant you are dealing with you, must be prepared to deal with both the foragers and the colony. To do that requires the use of pesticides. In fact, the process requires two types of pesticides – bait and contact.
Bait is usually in granules, and the ants pick it up and carry it back to their nest where they eat it and die. It takes a while to kill off a large colony of ants. Contact pest control kills whatever it touches. If an ant walks across it, the ant dies. If a spider walks across the pesticide, it dies. It sounds simple. It’s not.
Contact pesticides have a nasty habit of spreading, which is why you should not use spray pesticides in your home. DIY pest control devices often do not work well enough to kill off an entire population of ants. The problem with DIY pesticides and sprays is that if you use them in your home, say around your baseboards and then you mop your floor, you spread the pesticide around your floor. Floors are where you kids sit and play, and your pets lay. You can see the problem.
If you have an ant infestation, the safest way to handle it is by using our professional service. Our professionals know how to use spray and contact pesticides so that they are safe. We know how to use granules and time release baits so that they do their job without endangering your family or harming your pets. Reach out to our experts so that you can safely remove ants and their entire colony.
